became known as obama care, the most significant overhaulsincemedicareandmedicaid in the 1960s. he pushed to shore up banks aftethe financial crisis. congress passed legislation two years ago imposing stricter regulations on financial institutions and giving more protection to customers. reforming the nation's finances has proved more difficult. republicans criticize obama for the mounting national debt, and they say the unemployment rate, 7.8%, is unacceptably high. >> the latest poll suggests the candidates are running close, but they were taken before the storm hit shore. earlier gene otani spoke about obama's successes and his failures. >> the president is not the first president obviously to promise change, but he certainly made that word stick. how do voters think he's done? >> obama did change a number of things and not the least of which is of course health care reform. presidents on both sides of the aisle tried before him and failed. and he ended the war in iraq and he passed the stimulus among a number of other financial initiatives. somexper say hwas peap too ambitious.

to address the housingrisis and what are you going to do toprotectmedicareandsocial security? i have strong positions on those issues. my opponent does not. >> reporter: tarkanian has benefited from his family's well known name here but failed to win an election in three prior attempts at public office. he has his own take on this race. >> i've tried very hard to get out to all the different areas within the community. i've had business meetings. i've had meetings with business leaders in the african-american community talking about businesses who are there and how we can help them get started and expand. at the same ti i've been out in areas talking to the onion farmers and some of the ranchers about the issues they're dealing with with workers and so forth. i've tried very hard to be a good representative and good a good understanding of what's important for those constituents. >> reporter: in august the campaign was infused with racial tension when tarkanian seemed to suggest that horsford was relying on his own ethnicity to win support from african-american voters. while defendin

more years of obama budget cutstomedicare." that'sarguable, they're not really cuts, but point is you don't know where it's coming from. a virginiaompa is behndt. its conservative clients are distancing themselvess from having anything to do with these anonymous text messages. >> warner: are the campaigns themselves using these methods to get out negative messages at this stage or are they all positive? >> they are not all positive by any means. the campaigns have web site which is n which president obama's people attack mitt romney and vice versa. so it's a mix of trying to identify your supporters and get them to register, get them to tell their friends, get them to tell people on facebook and also driving negative msages, sometimings snarky twitter-type messages against the other guy and using a technique called data mining. >> warner: tell us about that, because we had a couple interesting pieces that harry did in connection with "frontline" about what sorts of information the campaigns collect on potential voters. how extense livery the campaigns >> there is a company that